After a hasty breakfast, of which she remembered nothing but that she had eaten it, Susanna found herself on the street car bound for college. She had indeed been dimly aware of the states through which she had passed up to the time of her presence in the car; had known that getting out of bed felt cold and premature; that bathing felt pleasurably hot; that her hair fixed itself becomingly this morning, and that she looked well in the mirror over the dressing table. But her only fully conscious moments, when thoughts and sensations met in focused attention, were those spent before that other mirror situated in the recesses of the right hand corner of her dressing-room which a shaft of light, penetrating from the bedroom, struck, and partially illumined.
For in this mirror Susanna suddenly became beautiful. But it was not because she became beautiful that Susanna contemplated herself with sharp attention, it was because unhappily she suspected that in beautifying her this enchanted mirror had coincidently transformed her into some one totally unlike herself. She suspected—: she was not certain; in spite of her eighteen years of life, and the very pronounced interest she took in her appearance, she had in truth only the faintest idea of what “she looked like.” And in critically illumined moments she knew that she did not know how she really looked, and it disturbed her deeply.— It even disconcerted her to remember what had occurred not long ago, one evening, when she was sitting out a dance with Mr.
Whitney, who admired her, and whose admiration, flowing from so difficult a source, flattered her. To this source of admiration, then, reputedly run dry through years of wasted sentimental experience, she had à propos of some compliment boldly remarked: “Oh, I know that my face isn’t regular; it’s only interesting.” “But you’re quite mistaken, Miss Susanna,” the oldish livedout-to-the-point-of-being-devoid-of-tact Mr. Whitney, aged thirty-three, had replied, with a flicker in his fishy eye; “your features are quite perfectly regular, and your countenance is entirely charming, but not, as yet, unusually interesting.” Indeed, whenever Susanna recalled this conversational occurrence, or, more accurately put, whenever this occurrence recalled itself to Susanna, as it did with unpleasant persistency, and preferably at this mirror, bringing a blush along with it posthumously as it were,—Susanna wondered whether she had deserved to have this upsetting liberty taken by Mr.
Deserved it for having been so very personal herself. . . . For, in accordance with what were generally held to be purely-social-intercoursemanners, she had of course transgressed; she had not, of course, conformed to the standards implicit in conversations ending abruptly with “oh, if you are going to be personal, we had better change the subject.” But, in accordance with her own feelings it was quite as natural and quite as fascinating to jump into a personal conversation as for a child to play with fire. . . . And in regard to the resultant burn, Susanna felt doubtful whether she would have known it to be an unpleasant pain if she had not so insistently been told so,—because, really, in feeling, it was rather a pleasant pain.
Thus, gazing into the mirror situated in the shadows, in which she became so dramatically beautiful a creature in the style of a chiaroscuro photograph, Susanna’s thoughts, feelings and sensations fused in a moment of full and complex consciousness. It contained not only her unhappy suspicion that she was decidedly less goodlooking than this strange simulacrum,—it contained not only the frustrated wish to know just how goodlooking she really was, and how goodlooking a, b, and c thought her, but it crystallized finally into a sharp worry lest her looks and her character did not sufficiently match one another. . . . She suddenly feared that this physical type of hers, which she found so difficult to realize, might somehow restrict her spiritual development within its own limits, as a frame limits and delimits its picture.
And how—Susanna reflected uneasily—could she or anyone else realize and define a type which from the front view was one, and from the side view another. . . . As now, for instance, she viewed herself in this mirror, she saw an oval the colour of pale ivory, an aureole of shining copper hair, wide open serious grey eyes with straight brows that rose a little at the inner ends, bowshaped, full but compressed lips, an ordinary straight nose;—in combination an even, regular, almost classical face, a face a little like a passport face, she thought,—but she thought it very low, so to say, because she instinctively disliked the strange self-face to overhear these critical thoughts that had a way of obtruding themselves without her permission. . . . On the other hand—she reflected—looked at from the side, this baffling but beloved face was totally changed.
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